forbloggers,warisnocakewalk

Livewire: For bloggers, war is no cakewalk

Reuters. Wednesday April 9, 2004

By Bernhard Warner

LONDON (Reuters) - Last week's daring midnight rescue of
19-year-old American soldier Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital has
become one of the few feel-good stories of the war for Western media
outlets.

For George Paine, a technology consultant-turned-amateur war
correspondent, it was a headache. Before the dramatic rescue of the
injured young woman, Paine wrote a short update for his Web site
http://www.warblogging.com/ mistakenly reporting that Lynch was among
the soldiers presumed dead.

Paine, part of a growing community of online diarists called
"bloggers," awoke the next morning to irate e-mails from readers and
fellow bloggers.

"I was exhausted. I didn't make clear Jessica was only MIA," the New York-based war watcher said afterwards.

In the annals of journalism, Paine's mistake had minimal
impact. The responses led him to quickly correct the error and move on.

NEW BRAND OF JOURNALISTS

More and more readers are discovering Warblogging.com,
Warblogs.cc (http://www.warblogs.cc/) and the scores of similar sites
as they look for a fresh and unfiltered perspective on current events
as well as a forum for debate.

Blogs -- Net speak for Web logs -- are a brand of grassroots
journalism that has really taken off since war began in Iraq last month
with amateurs and professional journalists alike joining the movement.

But it hasn't been a cakewalk for bloggers.

So far, bloggers have experienced many of the same headaches as
big media -- long work days, mounting costs, the occasional enraged
reader, hack attacks -- plus a few new twists that underscore the
complexity of blogging the news.

CNN cameraman Kevin Sites, on assignment in Iraq, was asked by
his employer to cease updating his blog site http://www.kevinsites.net
for the time being to avoid potential reporting conflicts. BBC producer
Stuart Hughes' blog http://stuarthughes.blogspot.com/, went quiet for
four days last week while he recuperated from a land mine injury in
Northern Iraq.

Most blogs, however, come from ordinary Netizens voicing their
opinion, from the safety of their home or office, about a war thousands
of miles away. Their exploits can be found by typing in "warblogs" on
index sites such as Daypop,
http://www.daypop.com/search?q=warblogs&t=a.

The explosion in popularity is due to the viral nature of
blogging. Bloggers promote the best and brightest writing samples of
fellow bloggers by adding links to their works on their own Web sites.

This fraternal connection explains how sometimes a rather
obscure blog site can suddenly attract a global audience and become a
small force in influencing public opinion.

Traffic to Warblogging.com has exploded, growing from dozens
of readers last summer to an average of 60,000 per day and nearly
120,000 on March 20, the first full day of the war -- an increase that
made access to the site spotty at the outset.

Paine is not the only blogger to incur traffic bottlenecks. Most blog sites are ill-equipped to handle lots of readers.

Laura Poyneer, a 29-year-old American paralegal student, sent
out a plea for help from her Arab-themed Web blog site
http://www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/veiled4allah.php when traffic
increased thirty-fold in the first days of the war.

Within 24 hours, readers kicked in more than $100 to cover
bandwidth costs. "Not a lot, but enough to cover my increased expenses,
at least for the moment," Poyneer said via email.

BLOG, BLOG, BLOG

Bloggers often make visceral statements about the war that established media wouldn't touch.

Paine wrote one article in the first days of the war that
provoked the ire of some readers. It said not everyone saw American and
British troops as liberators, a view at odds with the portrayal by some
American TV reporters of the U.S.-led coalition.

How did readers respond?

Some tried to knock his site offline by flooding it with
countless data requests designed to bog down his computer. Although the
response was intercepted by his Internet Service Provider, the site was
still difficult to reach for some time.

American journalist Christopher Albritton, believed to be the
first Web-funded -- with money raised from readers -- correspondent to
report from the Iraqi war zone, encountered an entirely different
problem.

While Albritton was en route to the Turkey-Iraq border to get
closer to the action, one of his readers took it upon himself to fill
the temporary void by posting a New Yorker article on Albritton's site.

"Whoever is posting some other journalist's work in the
comments section, just stop. This 'blog, Back to Iraq, is a forum for
the works of Chris Allbritton," read a notice on his Web page,
http://www.Back-to-Iraq.com, posted by a friend who was minding the
site while Albritton was incommunicado.

The story was taken down. But it illustrates some of the
unique technical and social challenges faced by the scores of
correspondents blogging from the front.

Reached via email, Albritton, a former reporter for the
Associated Press and the New York Daily News, was philosophical about
the future of this form of journalism.

"It's a marketplace of ideas, and those who are awarded credibility by their readers will prosper," he said.

So far, the marketplace is paying off for Albritton. He said
he's raised more than $11,000 from readers, enough to fund his trip to
Iraq, from where he has been filing daily stories.